Credit Where It’s Due, Not Where It Isn’t

By chance, three accounts of how the surge became White House policy have appeared over the past few weeks: Michael Gordon’s in the Times, Steve Coll’s in The New Yorker, and Bob Woodward’s in the Post (part of the usual rollout of his latest bestseller, “The War Within”). Together they paint a picture of a President who finally did the right thing after presiding over years of failure and calling it success. To give him credit feels like praising a man for calling 911 well after his carelessness started a fire that had killed half his neighbors by the time he picked up the phone. And yet, for making an improbable decision against the advice of most of his Administration and in the face of all the political winds blowing through the country, Bush deserves credit.

So, according to these accounts, do some of the very officials whose arrogance, dishonesty, and negligence contributed mightily to the destruction of Iraq between 2003 and 2007: Dick Cheney, who finally snapped his unbroken streak of wrong calls on everything from W.M.D.s to Chalabi to the insurgency; Cheney’s aide John Hannah, a key purveyor of false prewar information about Iraq and Al Qaeda; William Luti, who bore heavy responsibility for the failure of postwar planning under Douglas Feith, at the Pentagon; Meghan O’Sullivan, one of Bremer’s top aides during the disastrous first year of occupation in Iraq, who went on to oversee the management of two losing wars at the White House; Stephen Hadley, O’Sullivan’s boss at the National Security Council, who sat at the nerve center of White House decision-making throughout the war; retired General Jack Keane, who had served as a Rumsfeld rubber stamp when he was acting Army chief of staff early in the war; scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, which had predicted an easy occupation, blocked postwar planning, and insisted that there were enough troops in Iraq well after their insufficiency was clear. All of these people were wrong for longer than seems humanly possible.

And then, in late 2006, at the rock bottom of the war, when everyone from Nancy Pelosi to James Baker was pushing for withdrawal, they got behind a new strategy that most of them had resisted for years. I was in Baghdad when Bush announced the surge. An Iraqi friend expressed a forlorn hope that the new security plan would work, and though I told him that I shared the sentiment, inwardly I felt embarrassed that he still had any faith left in the U.S. government, which no longer deserved it. I had already lost mine and doubted that the surge—which I supported in the absence of anything other than the ongoing apocalypse—could succeed. My friend had no choice; he was Iraqi.

This time, the “Kool-Aid drinkers”—the true believers—finally got it right. How to explain it? Most of them had spent so long on Iraq that they were willing to gamble everything when other, less heavily invested public figures had essentially given up. Some were ideologues who never lost their blind assurance in their own views, even after years of being wrong. A few had begun to learn the hard way.

The Woodward excerpts make it clear that for months, if not years, the Administration lied to the public in its assessment of the war. The fear of straying from an upbeat script was pervasive in the Bush White House, and it contributed directly to the doomed strategy of handing control over to the Iraqi army in the middle of a civil war. I’ve written before about the folly of “strategic communications”—treating war like a political campaign in which the key to victory is “message discipline.” A war has its own reality, beyond the reach of media strategists and focus groups, and eventually it will blow up even the best talking points. You can’t go on lying to others without corrupting your own grasp of the truth; you can’t spend all day every day saying red is green, then somehow regain your perceptual sharpness when you’re alone at night. I discussed Iraq with two of the people in Woodward’s new book at a time when Woodward describes them as squarely facing the debacle, and when I tried to get them to acknowledge that the Administration’s strategy was failing, they still clung to the fantasy of progress. Maybe they felt it necessary to dissemble even in an off-the-record conversation. But at some point, it no longer matters whether you’re lying to yourself or others; at some point, you no longer know the difference.

Which brings up politics. A lot has been written lately about the dishonest tactics of the two tickets, especially McCain-Palin. The problem with a campaign based on relentless message discipline, repeated falsehoods, and the habitual perversion of language is that none of it stops after election day. You can’t be indifferent to truth for months on end and then suddenly return to straight talk. If McCain should win, Steve Schmidt won’t be in charge of the new Administration, but his spirit will. Prostitutes hardly ever go straight: the mental atmosphere of a campaign becomes the mental atmosphere of a government. And the results aren’t pretty—ask any Iraqi.